Is China really ready to conquer Taiwan
Michael Rubin
China has declared it is “ready to fight” over the future of Taiwan, a country to which it has no historical or legal claims. In many ways, its vociferous rhetoric mirrors that of Russia before its Ukraine invasion. At the time, many American analysts took Russia’s assessment of its military at face value. The White House even advised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to flee his country rather than face what they believed to be a successful Russian conquest and his inevitable death.
While Beijing’s bellicose rhetoric has grown, is it truly ready to fight or is China, like Russia, a paper tiger? Is President Xi Jinping’s aggressiveness merely cover for growing rot within his own military and society?
Certainly, China has formidable technology. It is at the forefront of hypersonic missiles, lasers, drones, and artificial intelligence. It can rain mass destruction on Taiwan just by launching missiles down upon densely populated Taipei or Kaohsiung, but occupying the country is another thing.cite
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As my colleague, demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, has pointed out, China today pays the price for decades of its one-child policy, economically, socially, and militarily. In October 2022, I visited the Indian frontier with China high in the Ladakh Mountain, many of whose peaks exceed 20,000 feet. On average, every Indian soldier defending their homeland had three brothers or sisters. Every Chinese soldier just a couple kilometers away was an only child.
Taiwan is topographically among the most challenging islands on earth. Should the People’s Liberation Army seek to occupy the island, they will lose not only tens of thousands of soldiers in the inevitable guerrilla campaign that would follow, but also tens of thousands of only children. China’s growing elderly population relies almost exclusively upon their children. The casualties China would face in Taiwan would affect elites in Beijing and Shanghai upon whom Xi depends.
China’s growth and affluence would also raise the stakes on the home front. Perhaps the greatest mistake of the Biden administration’s approach to Ukraine has been its demand Ukrainians limit the fight to within their own borders. This, in turn, diminished the cost to Russia of its aggression.
If the Biden administration does not force Taiwan to limit its defense to the island itself, the cost to China could be even higher. In November 2022, I visited Quemoy [Kinmen], site of the Eisenhower-era Taiwan Strait crisis. The mainland Chinese city of Xiamen (Amoy), with its nearly five million people, lies just a couple miles away—closer to Kinmen that Newark, New Jersey is to Manhattan. Whereas the People’s Liberation Army once shelled Quemoy, Beijing knows the Taiwan Strait crisis can be played in reverse. Will hundreds of thousands of families in Xiamen really want to risk their only children?
The simple fact is this: China has not fought a major war since 1979, when it invaded Vietnam. At best, the result was an expensive stalemate. In reality, Vietnam defeated the People’s Liberation Army.
The United States should not rush into war, but it should not allow China’s bluster to distract it from reality: China can inflict great damage, but it is a declining and reticent military power. To conquer Taiwan would likely be a Pyrrhic victory, one that would cost the Chinese Communist Party its nearly 75-year monopoly on power in mainland China.
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Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.